User blog:RJ Long/Everything old is new again
The following is the Foreword from the seventh edition of the Commodore Products Source List, published in June 1999. In the last Foreword, I wrote about how many people are rediscovering the Commodore 64 and 128. This nostalgia has since spilled over into a couple of interesting areas. Not only have the Commodore-related websites and the C64 emulators grown in number and quality, but there is now a computer being sold using some of the same strategies that made the Commodore 64 such a success: it has a low price tag, can use a TV as a display, and has ROM-based utilities, one of which is a C64 emulator. This "Web.It" computer is made by a division of Tulip Computers, the European company that bought the rights to Commodore's 8-bit line. (The Amiga line is in the hands of Gateway, and their Amiga division has recently relocated to the Silicon Valley area. The little hand-held computers are maturing also. While there isn't a C64 emulator for them yet, I wouldn't rule that as impossible. After all, the best way to get a C64 programmer to create a program is to tell them, "You can't do that on a Commodore." The games Wizardry and Starflight were initially deemed too complex for the C64 to run, but eventually Sir-Tech and Electronic Arts produced C64 versions. Nick Rossi blew the "Z-modem will never be in a C64 terminal program because the Z-modem code is 50K long" argument out of the water when he released Novaterm 9.6 with the Z-modem protocol. What is running on these hand-held computers are the Infocom text adventures. At the time Infocom first translated their mainframe Zork program to home computers, just before 1980, home computers did not have very detailed graphics or sound. So Infocom chose to make the words the programs used more descriptive, and let the horsepower inside your imagination fill in the picture and provide the sound. The result was programs that ran on a wide range of computers, back when every computer had its own way of doing things. And they run just fine on today's hand-held computers. While I was looking through some old magazines for articles about Infocom I discovered that even my own Products List falls into the "everything old is new again" category. INFO Magazine used to have in their issues a "Product Roundup", listing which programs and hardware were available for the C64/C128 and which dealers sold their magazine. But, as more companies made items and the magazine added in Amiga coverage (and later switched over to just Amiga coverage), this was discontinued. Tenex did the same thing on a larger scale with their "Everything Book"—a full catalog that showed what was available. It wasn't after 1990 that the first glimmers of the Commodore Products Source List showed up, and at first it was just a small list inside the Tri-City Commodore Computer Club's newsletter. The third time that I printed the Products List, it had grown large enough to require its own issue. Each year, it's grown bigger. Issue #6 in August 1997 contained 190 entries of people, businesses and user groups that supported the C64 and C128 computers. The List as it is today: Products List #7 is even bigger than List #6. While a few places have gone out of business, the Commodore-supporting Internet sites have increased. There are many more Commodore-related web sites than what are listed here. The sites that are here in the Products List offer more than the usual collection of links to other Commodore sites. In the case where a personal site is listed, it might be because it contains the programs that that person has written over the years, or because it offers something unique, like Commodore 128-specific information. Some of the sites in the Internet Resources provide a similar service as the Products List. The Products List differs from these sites in that it's main purpose is to locate places where you can still purchase Commodore items, and to personally verify the information as best I can. That won't prevent outdated information from creeping in, but it will cut back on some of it. Read the Products List Info for further details. At this point, I'd like to take a moment to say thanks to the Tri-Cities Commodore Computer Club. They loaned me several months' worth of exchange newsletters to look through for places to add into this issue. In the past when I was editor for that club, the exchange newsletters played a major part in my research for the Products List. I still host the TC-Cubed web site, which is located at ''(site now offline). Category:Pastwords Category:Blog posts